How To Play Classic DOOM On Linux With Doomsday Engine

Even to this day, DOOM remains one of the most important PC games of all time. It introduced the world to fun first-person shooters, fast-paced gameplay, and ingenious level design. Sadly, if you play Classic Doom on Linux, the experience isn’t all that great as the creator of the game largely neglects the platform and only offers aging solutions. Thankfully, Doomsday Engine exists.

Doomsday Engine a project to make playing old games like DOOM easier. Better still, it offers easy game enhancements like high resolution, V-SYNC, and more!

Install Doomsday Engine

Installing the Doomsday Engine under Linux is quite easy, as the developer has binary packages available on the website. To install the Doomsday Engine, open up a terminal and enter the commands that correspond with your operating system.

Ubuntu

Doomsday Engine supports Ubuntu users via a downloadable Debian package. To get this package, you’ll need to open up the terminal and use the wget tool to download it.

wget http://api.dengine.net/1/builds?dl=doomsday_2.0.3_amd64.deb

With the file downloaded, use the dpkg packaging tool to install it to Ubuntu.

sudo dpkg -i doomsday_2.0.3_amd64.deb

Having issues installing the package? You may have run into dependency issues. Luckily, this issue is easy to fix. In the terminal prompt, run the following:

To run Doomsday Engine, search for “Doomsday 2” in the app menu on Debian.

Arch Linux

The Doomsday Engine developers don’t provide any instructions to Arch users for the package. Luckily, Arch fans who want the program can easily install it via the AUR.

Before downloading anything from the AUR, you’ll need to install the latest version of Git to Arch.

sudo pacman -S git

With Git working, it’s safe to download the latest snapshot of Doomsday Engine from the AUR.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/doomsday-bin.git
cd doomsday-bin

At this point, the installation is ready to begin. Though, keep in mind that because Doomsday Engine depends on files from the AUR, the makepkg command may fail. In the event that this happens, you’ll need to fix the problem by manually installing all dependencies.

Generate and install Doomsday Engine on Arch Linux by running the makepkg command.

makepkg -si

Fedora

Fedora Linux users will have an easy time installing the Doomsday Engine, as an RPM file is available on the official website. Using the wget tool, download the package.

Generic Linux

Tthe developers of Doomsday Engine have made the source code available so the program can easily be built on any Linux distribution. Follow the steps below to build and install the Doomsday Engine on your operating system.

Step 1: install the required dependency files

Qt 5 (modules: Core, Network, Gui, OpenGLExtensions, Widgets)

Qt 5 X11Extras module (on Unix/X11)

Git

Cmake

Step 2: use the Git tool to download the source code to your Linux PC.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/skyjake/Doomsday-Engine

Step 3: create a new build directory in the source code.

mkdir Doomsday-Engine/build

Step 4: move the terminal from the Doomsday-Engine folder to the new build sub-folder.

cd Doomsday-Engine/build

Step 5: compile the code.

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../doomsday

Step 6: install Doomsday Engine.

make
make install

Set Up Doomsday Engine

With the engine installed, the hard work is over. The last part of the process is downloading the actual game. In the terminal, use the wget tool to download the latest Doom shareware files.